Muuahahah
My influence is spreading! Adam is using Battlestar Galactica to drive his thesis.
I cackle with glee!
Category: …and everything else
Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.
So Much for Friday
So far today I’ve managed to oversleep, cut myself twice (at two wildly divergent times, on objects you wouldn’t think sharp enough to cut), get a good, cathartic three tears shed, and resigned myself to not going out until later.
I was planning on attending the funeral of a friend’s mother today, but just couldn’t get myself out the door. A funeral, combined with not knowing the deceased, combined with just feeling horrible, seemed like an increasingly bad idea. Still, part of me feels guilty for not being there to see my friend.
And, continuing proof of God’s ironness…
It’s like they’re opposite points of the pendelum, only I don’t control the swing. I can’t be in contact with both, only one at a time. Maybe magnets is a better analogy…
Perhaps I Should Leave Here, Go Far Away
My mind won’t rest and I don’t sleep Not even in my dreams…
I give hard work, loyalty and steadfastness. I swallow my frustrations and suppress my impulse to do what I would enjoy, and do what is expected of me instead. I do not put myself first; I put the needs of others ahead of my own. I give a lot, but what I get in return is worth it.
-Daniel Yankelovich, describing the ethic of self-denial (compared to the more current ethic of self-fulfillment)
…in their private lives people are less and less willing to pay the price of self-denial – whether it be to avoid a divorce, keep within one’s budget, practice, responsible family planning, give up anonymous and promiscuous sex, put the kids through college, give up your job to follow your husband, split the difference and look for a compromise, or slip and fall on your neighbor’s sidewalk and say it was your fault. As for people who are still willing to pay the price of self-denial (and of course many still are, or else we wouldn’t have a functioning society at all), they may look at others around them who are not and feel like suckers.
– Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings
Yeah, that about sounds right.
Where Have All the Teaspoons Gone?
In January 2004 the authors found their tearoom bereft of teaspoons. Although a flunky (MSCL) was rapidly dispatched to purchase a new batch, these replacements in turn disappeared within a few months. Exasperated by our consequent inability to stir in our sugar and to accurately dispense instant coffee, we decided to respond in time honoured epidemiologists’ fashion and measure the phenomenon.
A search of the medical and other scientific literature through Google, Google Scholar, and Medline using the keywords “teaspoon”, “spoon”, “workplace”, “loss” and “attrition” revealed nothing about the phenomenon of teaspoon loss. Lacking any guidance from previous researchers, we set out to answer the age old question “Where have all the bloody teaspoons gone?” We aimed to determine the overall rate of loss of teaspoons and the half life of teaspoons in our institute, whether teaspoons placed in communal tearooms were lost at a different rate from teaspoons placed in individual tearooms, and whether better quality teaspoons would be more attractive to spoon shifters or be more highly valued and respected and therefore move and disappear more slowly.
After five months we revealed our previously covert research project to the institute’s staff. They were asked to return or anonymously report any marked teaspoons that had made their way into desk drawers or homes. Two days after the revelation, staff were asked to complete a brief anonymous questionnaire, which dealt with their attitudes towards and knowledge of teaspoons and teaspoon theft.
The best part, though, is the commentary/responses. Especially reading the declared conflicts of interest (I’m particularly fond of the “sibling rivalry” answer!)
The Desire to Retreat
I know I’ve been quiet lately. Quieter than usual. Quieter than I promise to be. And it’s not that I’ve not had words; I mean, some of it has certainly been because of an injury I sustained to my left wrist and hand in December, necessitating a lessening of my time spent typing, but… that’s not it.
It’s been reluctance.
I am looking down the line, projecting out to summer. It’s hard not to; it’s that time in Seattle where everyone is dreaming of the sun and long days. And me? I don’t know where I’ll be. For the first time in my life, the first time ever, I don’t know where I will be living in 6 months. I don’t know when I’m leaving here, going where, nothing. It’s just…blank.
I think, once, this would have excited me. Now, it makes me sad. It makes me not want to move through my day, as if my stalling would stall the world. As if I could simply will time to stand still, and allow me to continually exist not in the moment, but this moment.
A good many of my friends are people I’ve managed to maintain friendships with while we’ve had diverse schedules that don’t compliment one another. We see each other once a month, if lucky, and spend our time chattering via computer-mediated forums. But I’ve finally made friends with people who don’t do this, who don’t live life glued to their keyboards, who don’t reply to email at all times of the day.
Some of them – one of them – has become very important to me. He has wormed his way into most aspects of my life, bent me around his little finger, and twisted his life into mine like branches grown together…and I fear what’s going to happen when those branches get pulled apart in a few months. Or sooner, perhaps, if he does start dating (as we are not); something he’s not planning on, but who knows what will happen in three days?
I know that nothing can stay the change, that the only constant is change. I know this, intellectually. But the part of me that feels? It doesn’t get it at all.
Life, right now, is one stress on another. I think I could handle this if it was my only stress, the not knowing where I will be, the fear of losing someone dear to me. But on it, I have my thesis, I have his thesis, my responsibility to my thesis-pod, to my class, my graduate school applications and the nerve-wracking wait to find out if anyone will take me at all, the sudden lack of a job, my health (and lack of, at least in my arms) – the list can go on.
I guess that this stress, this fear, is the one my mind circles to because it’s the only one I feel as though I have a modicum of control over. It’s the one where I could walk away, I could leave, I could close doors and do my best to stop feeling now, instead of dealing with hurt then. To retreat, bring about and nurse the wounds I know are coming, and move forward and on.
Except I could never do that. I will see this to the end, be it tomorrow, next week, or never.